The issue of NWTRCC’s More Than a Paycheck is out. It includes articles on the following:
If the IRS is collecting from you by seizing your assets or your paychecks, they’re supposed to leave you enough to live on. they announced a major overhaul in how they calculate how much “enough to live on” is.
As the news just came out , I haven’t had a chance to really dig in to it. One of the things that jumped out at me was that they’ve eliminated their weird method of calculating how much you get to live on based on how much you make. The way they used to do it, if you had a high income, they’d assume you needed more money to keep up your rich lifestyle, so they’d let you keep more than they’d let a person with a lower income keep.
As I reported , this led to some kind of silly results, in which, for instance, “tax debtors earning up to $84,000 — almost twice the median income for all households in the United States — [were] designated as being in financial hardship” and thus immune from collection.
The new standards are based only on the number of people in the household, and not the standard of living to which they have become accustomed. If the IRS is collecting from you and you’re making less than $1,667 per month, this is probably good news; if you’re making more than $2,500 per month, you may find that they take a bigger bite now.
Thanks to Market Anarchist Blog Carnival and Tax Carnival for plugging The Picket Line.
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